This poem helped provide comfort to the people during the
“And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me.” (Dubois). Dubois is using an analogy he is comparing the sea to his tears a life long cry that is almost never ending. Next Dubois uses an allusion. ¨Years have passed away since then, -ten, twenty, fourty; years of National life, fourty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nations feast.¨ (Dubois).
Cullen wrote a poem called For a Poet. The poem is about how Cullen has treated his dreams. The poems by Hughes and Cullen discuss similarities in dreams, but they are different in the way they are written, how they should be spoken and the emotion that is produced by them. The way in which each of the writers, Hughes and Cullen, write has differences and similarities. Hughes writes his poem
Reading through this book showed a lot of examples of people not respecting other’s ethnic groups, beliefs, and economic status. In the novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird”, Harper Lee explicates the topic of how everyone should be accepting others by their appearances because everyone is made the same, even though their nationality might be different. Take for example, an egg: there are brown eggs and a white eggs, from the outside they may look different, but on the inside they have a yolk. Just like a human, we may look different from the outside, but we are still similar on the inside. After reading this book people should accept others regardless of who they are and what would happen if we accept people in this world.
Tone enhances the overall message of the poem and how it shows the different perspectives. How in the end we are all insignificant when it’s all said and done. The overall tone of this poem is sadness. Tim Seibles states that “So many years together you might think we would be kinder because, no matter what anybody says about anybody else, we were all born to this planet suddenly blinking under the same star and evening sky means the universe is floating.” This quote stated shows the overall message of how to treat others with kindness
In Countee Cullen’s Modern American poem “Any Human To Another,” Cullen reveals the importance of empathy as it brings mankind closer to one another. Cullen begins the poem by stating that his sorrows are “at not [him] alone,” which refers to how Cullen’s belief that he should share his troubles with others in order to ensure that others can learn how to empathize and feel connected. The sorrows being shared “pierce to the marrow,” which suggests that the pain can be felt and shared with others disregarding physical appearance to the point where the sorrows pierce straight to the core of a human ignoring the physical differences they share. As Cullen continues, he explains how “your grief and mine must intertwine,” which refers to Cullen’s belief that people must empathize in order to feel closer each there as humans and how people must treat other ’s sorrows as their own.
In Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, Dana battles an external conflict of time traveling to the past, and experiencing what it was like to be a slave. Dana ultimately resolves this conflict by killing her ancestor named Rufus to return to her present time; however, this choice also illustrates her true character as both scared but brave. Dana’s decision to kill Rufus because she did not want to live in a time where slavery and racism occurred also reveals the universal theme that racism was very common in the past, and it still occurs till this day. When traveling to the past Dana struggles with an external conflict of racism and slavery.
These were some of my favorite readings so far that we had been required to read through. They were very enlightening and provided many great perspectives and stories from white and minority people alike. The three readings I enjoyed the most are Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?” by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Color-Blind Racism by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and Smells Like Racism by Rita Chaudhry Sethi. What I liked about Bonilla-Silva’s piece is the quotes taken from the white privilege.
This is an important role of poetry because everyone loses something precious to them at some point in their life. Her next example talks of a person who can receive
The narrator within the poem perceives himself as superior to the subjects that he observes, and recognizes that they behave as savages due to the absence of rules and boundaries. They fail to acknowledge the error in their destructive behavior and continue to act with free will, which portrays human nature as wicked and unruly. One of them glanced at the narrator and insinuated that they were equals, which implies that the narrator also indulges in sinful behavior with the rest of them. Despite the narrator’s feeling of superiority, their actions reflect the same manner as those they view as beneath them. There exists a domino effect that causes the behavior of others to influence the nature of those surrounding them.
Through the poem’s tone, metaphors used, and symbols expressed the poem portrays that fear can make life seem charred or obsolete, but in reality life propels through all seasons and obstacles it faces. The poem begins with a tone of conversation, but as it progresses the tone changes to a form of fear and secretiveness. The beginning and ending line “we tell
In this poem, we are taught to value everyone because we don’t know their stories and we don’t know what they have been through. An example of this is “He tried to kill himself in grade ten when a kid who could still go home to mom and dad had the audacity to tell him “get over it” as if depression is something that can be remedied by any of the contents found in a first aid
The poem begins with the speaker looking at a photograph of herself on a beach where the “sun cuts the rippling Gulf in flashes with each tidal rush” (Trethewey l. 5-7). The beach is an area where two separate elements meet, earth and water, which can represent the separation of the different races that is described during the time that her grandmother was alive and it can also represent the two races that are able to live in harmony in the present day. The clothing that the two women wear not only represent how people dressed during the different time periods, but in both the photographs of the speaker and her grandmother, they are seen standing in a superman-like pose with their hands on “flowered hips” (Trethewey l. 3,16). The flowers on the “bright bikini” (Trethewey l. 4) are used to represent the death of segregation, similar to how one would put flowers on a loved one’s grave, and on the “cotton meal sack dress” (Trethewey l. 17) it is used to symbolize love and peace in a troubled society.
In the first stanza, we can already see how this poem can relate to the world today and how we feel about certain things. We as humans don't like change. Sometimes, we want something to happen so bad, that we don't consider how our life might change if this wish, this hope of something, actually happened. We sometimes may want something so bad, but fear what the consequences might be if something goes
This whole poem could simply be a metaphor that was related to Louise Erdrich’s biographical background. In her biography, it says, “As the daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, Erdrich explores Native American themes in her works…” (“Louise Erdrich” 1). The flood
